Armenia, Australia & the Great War

Australian civilians worked for decades supporting the survivors and orphans of the Armenian Genocide massacres. 24 April 1915 marks the beginning of two great epics of the First World War. It was the day the allied invasion forces set out for Gallipoli; and it marked the beginning of what became the Genocide of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenians. For the first time, this book tells the powerful, and until now neglected, story of how Australian humanitarians helped people they had barely heard of and never met, amid one of the twentieth century’s most terrible human calamities. With 50 000 Armenian-Australians sharing direct family links with the Genocide, this has become truly an Australian story.

Vicken Babkenian is an independent researcher for the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sydney, and a committee member of Manning Clark House, Canberra. He has written several articles on Australian international humanitarianism for newspapers and peer-reviewed history journals. Vicken’s research has been cited in numerous radio and television documentaries on the Great War and its aftermath. Peter Stanley is one of Australia’s most distinguished and active historians ? he was formerly the Principal Historian at the Australian War Memorial, where he worked from 1980?2007. The author of 30 books, including Bad Characters, which jointly won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2011. His most recent book is Lost Anzacs (2014), published by NewSouth. He appears often in TV documentaries, films and in the media. Peter is President of Honest History and is no stranger to controversy in Australian history. In 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.